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Magic has been tied, throughout the ages, with language and the learning of such. The Qabalah shows an extreme example. According to Qabalistic thought, the world was created through the agencies of letters. Great archetypal associations and powers are attributed to and heaped upon these sacred letters. A look at the content of the Sepher Yetzirah, a text central to the Qabalah, reveals the importance placed on such letters, right from the very beginning of it. The Hindus have a quite similar conception, and we see large traces of it elsewhere. Throughout the history of written language, we see it used repeatedly, from almost the very beginning, in the form of "charms" or "amuletic texts." This use pops up everywhere that a written character does. The text is seen as able to convey some sort of magical potency. Writing is an extremely recent invention in comparison to speech, however, and we can easily see that this potency is merely a reflection of the potency attached to the spoken language far before the invention of writing. Many of our surviving charms are written records of things to be spoken aloud, often with instructions for recitation. A general survey of the power of language, in written word and speech, is far beyond the scope of this essay, however, as a even a cursory exploration of such would be hardly contained by a book the size of Frazer's one volume The Golden Bough. A decent exploration would have to fill an amount of volumes approximating the unabridged version of that same work. The interest of this essay is in exploring how this relationship is shown in the English language, its close neighbors and antecedents. Most of the ideas here are explored in part in the Phurba Etymologicon under entries for each of the individual English words discussed here. The central aim of this essay is to take that material and look at it in a more cohesive fashion, alongside some evidence that is beyond the scope of the Etymologicon for one reason or another. The reader is referred to the Etymologicon for more information and variants of the words found here. This essay represents a rough draft of one of the central chapters of the upcoming book, provisionally titled Magic Words: The Etymology of Magical Terminology. When the book reaches publication, it will be announced on this website. This essay is meant to be read straight through, but a hyperlinked table of contents has been provided here so the reader may refer back to any section at will. Next, The Runic Mysteries |